In Furniture, Shades and Shapes of High Art

LONDON — One of the busiest places in Milan this week will be Bar Basso on Via Plinio, packed with designers who have flocked to the city for the Salone del Mobile, the annual furniture fair. Many of them will raise a glass to the man who was largely responsible for encouraging the design crowd to gather there — the late London-born, Milan-based industrial designer James Irvine.

It was typical of Irvine, who died in February at the age of 54, to have decided to draw a crowd to his favorite watering hole and to have pulled it off with such aplomb. When he lived nearby in the early 1990s, Irvine persuaded Bar Basso’s owner to allow him to invite friends there during design week and to stay open for longer than usual. Charming and convivial, Irvine had moved to Milan in 1984 to work for the venerable Italian designer Ettore Sottsass at the Olivetti electronics group, and he stayed in the city to establish a successful design studio and a happy family life.

Irvine’s death, which will be marked by a memorial party at his studio Monday evening, is a tragic loss, but the legacy of his unofficial role as cultural attaché to the design industry will endure in the finer qualities of Milan’s design jamboree. Brash, frenzied, overcrowded and overpriced though the city can be during the furniture fair, the best of the hundreds of events taking place this week will reflect the dynamism, ingenuity and passion for design and its history that once attracted a talented young designer like Irvine to Milan, and convinced him to stay there.

The Salone del Mobile, which opens Tuesday at the Rho fairground and closes Sunday, is rooted in the expansion of Italian manufacturing during la dolce vita era of the 1950s and 1960s, when visionary industrialists collaborated with talented designers to develop technically innovative products in an elegant, modern style. Some of the companies that emerged still dominate their product categories, as Flos does in lighting and Kartell and Magis do in plastic products.

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Fionda chairs designed by Jasper Morrison for the Italian manufacturer Mattiazzi.CreditGerhardt Kellermann/Mattiazzi

Italy’s political instability has affected the design scene, as illustrated by the controversy over the dismissal last month of the architect Stefano Boeri as Milan’s councilor for design, fashion and culture. The country’s economic woes and those of other established furniture markets have also taken a toll, yet the Rho fair and its fringe projects still bring more visitors to Milan than any other event does and it dominates the global design calendar.

About 338,000 people attended the fair in 2012, more than in 2011, but less than 2008’s record of 383,793 visitors. The big European and North American manufacturers that exhibit there are benefiting from sales growth in expanding economies of Asia and Latin America, but are also threatened by low-cost competitors in those regions. Even the most prestigious companies have suffered, including Richard Ginori, the Florentine porcelain maker, which has a rich design heritage dating to the 1700s but went bankrupt in January.

Many of the survivors have considerable strengths, not least in their technical expertise, design prowess and imposing archives. This week, both Flos and the Finnish furniture maker Artek will reissue products designed in the mid-20th century by the Italian lighting designer Gino Sarfatti and the Finnish architect Ilmari Tapiovaara respectively.

Yet the large groups are also struggling to adjust to an increasingly fragmented marketplace, and to pressure from consumers to operate more responsibly, ethically and environmentally. Some of the most dynamic participants in the fair in recent years have been smaller enterprises, which specialize in particular materials or technologies, and are often more progressive on the environmental front.

Several of the most interesting new products to be introduced in Milan this week will come from such businesses. Among them is a beautifully crafted wood and leather chair produced by the Dutch designer Dick van Hoff for Thomas Eyck of the Netherlands, and the angular wooden furniture developed by the German designer Konstantin Grcic and his British counterpart Jasper Morrison for the Italian manufacturer Mattiazzi.

The Mattiazzi products are made in the rugged, Spartan style that promises to be an important trend in Milan: So are the new pieces designed by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Magis and by their compatriot Jean-Marie Massaud for the Italian lighting company Foscarini.

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A wood and leather chair designed by Dick van Hoff for Thomas Eyck.CreditThomas Eyck

Equally influential will be the craftsmanship associated with Eyck’s objects, and multifunctional furniture that users can adapt to suit their changing needs, like the new seating-cum-storage systems developed by the German designer Werner Aisslinger for Italy’s Moroso and by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas for the U.S. group Knoll.

Flexibility will become even more important to the furniture industry in the future as the development of digital production technologies transforms the relationship between designers, manufacturers and consumers by enabling the latter to influence the design of original objects, rather than simply customizing finished pieces.

Digital production was explored by several fringe exhibitions in Milan last year, and will be again this time, including a series of workshops organized by the Dutch groups Prooff and UNStudio. One of Italy’s biggest furniture companies, Cassina, is to present the first phase of its experiments with the Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti.

A different futuristic theme is to be pursued in Afrofuture, a series of workshops featuring innovations in African design and technology at the department store La Rinascente.

Yet no Salone del Mobile would be complete without toasting Milan’s past design glories. Martino Gamper, Studio Formafantasma and other designers are to pay homage to the design maestri of the 1950s and 1960s in an exhibition at La Triennale Design Museum, which is also presenting a tribute to the Italian designer Gae Aulenti, who died in November.

And Domus magazine has commandeered Casa degli Atellani, the house where Leonardo da Vinci lived while painting “The Last Supper,” to exhibit Ramak Fazel’s photographs of the Milanese design scene since the early 1990s, including, of course, many shots of past Saloni.